One of the themes that I have an interest in is the post-apocalyptic style that games and films have, only it has really turned into a cliché. Usually the theme is that mankind has abused technology or ruined the environment to the point where the world has turned deserts, buildings have collapsed and in general the world looks brown and near lifeless. With this theme in mind I looked at ways to change the generic tropes and clichés so rather than going for a viral outbreak as seen in numerous movies such as 28 weeks later or Resident Evil: Extinction. Or events such as technology turning aginast humanity as seen (or implied) in the Matrix trilogy; there are so many ‘reasons’ that this theme is used. I would argue that it is in some ways a cautionary story of what could happen if people misused science or technology, maybe even hypothesising how badly damaged we could leave the world from greed or countless wars.
But I don’t want to go down this ‘mankind destroyed the world’ route to this theme, instead I would prefer to go down the route where for some reason numerous people have left the world and left technology behind, perhaps not to the extent of Wall-e where almost all the world is a rubbish tip. The idea itself I imagine, has nature re-taking parts of the world and people are having to live in a setting where it’s still our world, but perhaps with damage and towering structures in the distance to create a distinct old world vs new world scenario.
To this end I have looked at various environments and looked at other’s artwork that could help come up a more suitable idea for my project, the main start point I had thought of was The Last of Us. As one of my favourite games I have spent hours exploring the various outdoor levels and taking in the environments whilst playing, but what I found interesting about the overall plot is that it’s not mankind tampering with something they can’t control leading to the end of the world trope, rather it is the Cordyceps fungus that managed to jump from ants to humans and drives them crazy and eventually lead to nature taking back most of the world as more and more people got infected.
What I like about the environments is that they don’t look as if they were decimated because of humans or conflict, they are damaged because of being unusable or look a little roughed up because people have had to try patching them up. They are mostly abandoned because of the huge number of infected people or just because people died out in certain areas. This is the sort of ‘aestetic’ that I’d like to try creating but perhaps blend it with another theme or genre.
However just like a dystopia, utopias are used frequently too from a number of films that I have see utopias often hide a dark secret, for example Elysium has two separate communities, one on earth and on on the Elysium (roll credits) the people on earth are seen as lesser and seem to suffer whereas those on the Elysium seem to have a near perfect life, there is probably more to it but just from looks alone the civilizations are separate based on technology. But for all intents and purposes both are under threat by the people that are in charge, be it factory managers or the corporate group that run the Elysium.
With both of these two themes I should probably create a hybrid of the two, my last project focused on Dieselpunk but ended up being loosely inspired by it, however this may give me the opportunity to try using the models in this project whilst I work on other skills such as tracking, matchmove and mattepainting.